Taskk.it: A Task Manager That Can Tell You What to Do

Have you ever noticed that it seems that your work can easily fill your whole day, and weekend, and then some? You’re not along. Parkinson’s law, “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion“, unfortunately seems to be all too true. And when you’re jumping around between dozens of tasks without enough time to complete any of them fully, you’ll end up feeling like you never really get anything done.

Taskk is a brand new app that tries to help you be more productive by letting you focus on what you actually have time to accomplish and finish in your schedule. It’s a simple app, but if it can actually help you be more productive, it’d be worth a try, right? Maybe that’s your problem: you need a bossy to-do list that tells you what to do, now.

Another to-do list?

The web has an embarrassment of riches when it comes to high quality project and task managers. Just the past year has seen Flow, Asana, Wunderkit, and others go from being unknown or inexistant to being leading apps for productivity. So is there space for yet another to-do list? Perhaps not, if it’s just going to be the standard tasks+lists app.

But what if the app takes a new spin on productivity, and actively tries to help you find what you should be working on, when. That’s what Taskk does. It’s a simple app, based on Twitter’s Bootstrap, but if you can take the time to estimate how long your tasks will take and how much time you have to work each day, it can create very nice schedules to make sure you get everything in with the time you have.

Taskk.it, currently in private beta

Task management always begins with tasks.

As you’d expect, Taskk starts with tasks and lists. You can create either from the top toolbar you’ll see on every Taskk screen, or can quickly jump in with the quick start buttons you’ll see the first time you login. You can add a name and description for your lists, tap enter, and seconds later you’ll have your new list ready for you to start adding tasks. I should go ahead and mention that Taskk is fully responsive, so you can use it on your desktop, tablet, or smartphone with equal ease.

A simple interface that could use fleshing out, but that's fully functional

Lists in Taskk work much as you’d expect. You can add task names directly, and then enter the length of time they’ll take. You can enter just a number for the amount of minutes it will take, or add the word hours if you’re entering the number of hours a task will take. You can then drag and drop tasks to rearrange them, and you can share a list with colleagues or publicly with the whole world if you’d like.

Add and organize tasks as you'd expect

Then, individual task pages are also familiar to anyone who’s used a to-do list or project management app before, but there’s some unique Taskk features. First, you can add comments with Markdown formatting, which is great to add extra info you might need to remember, but is especially nice to keep track of everyone’s thoughts when you’re working with your team. Then, the most unique feature is that you can set a specific date that the task has to be completed by, or a start date where the task doesn’t get done until after that date. Finally, you can also turn a task into a list to expand it into the sub-tasks you need.

Add Markdown comments and mark when a task has to be done

This, sir, is what you should be doing.

When you signed up for Taskk, you asked to be bossed around by a web app. But Taskk is a good boss. It lets you type in the number of hours you have to work each day, and then automatically divvies out your tasks based on the amount of time you can work. It’ll prioritize your tasks based on the deadlines you’ve included, and will try to fit in as much work as you can in each day. This way, the planner screen is easily where you’ll spend the most time in the app, and it’s the app’s most unique feature.

Right from the planner, you can change the amount of time you have to work each day, and then can quickly jump to the tasks that Taskk assigned you, and complete them right from the calendar. If you need to change the amount of time you can work, just enter the hour changes and click Update Planner. It’s a quick and simple way to plan your day and keep yourself on track.

Your tasks, automatically scheduled when you can do them

Where it Can Improve

Taskk is a beta app, and it still has a few rough spots. Among other things, the tips were a bit too chatty when I first started using the app, though you thankfully can turn them off easily. I also uncovered several small bugs with scheduling when I first tried out the app, but Brandon from the Taskk team was quick to respond and get fixes released, which was impressive. We’ll be excited to see how Taskk continues to improve and become a more definitive leading task management app.

The interface can be a bit cluttered with the startup help

Conclusion

If you’re just looking for a way to manage basic task lists and to-dos, there’s dozens of apps out there that can do that and more, and might even be a better choice than Taskk. But, if you want to plan you schedule based on the amount of time you have to work and the amount of time the tasks will take, Taskk is a great app to try. It does a great job at fitting your work into your time, and since you can still include the date by which a task must be done, you’ll still make sure everything’s done on time.